2-9: breakdown, exposure, (sk)interface, continued
This may seem terribly abstract, but it has very real political consequences for the computer user in the age of digital networks. For, as Wendy Chun further explains, despite the perception of user control afforded by the seemingly infinite transformability of information at the level of the GUI, "your networked Mac or Windows machine actually wanders all the time with other networked machines" [24] - constantly data mining, surveying, and expropriating value from user interactions without any sense of her input. So it is here that the implications of the computer virus as a media object gains more specifically political connotations: the cycle of viral copying, clogging, and breakdown can reveal the latent materiality of the computer as an ideology of machine. Thus, despite the ways in which the virus copies and propagates, imminent to networks that dematerialize information from body, and code from material source, the computer virus (ala Benjamin) also discloses "physiognomic aspects of the material world," "hidden details in familiar objects," "new structures of matter" [25] that have been obfuscated by the separation of software from hardware.
To be exposed to a computer virus, therefore, carries a double meaning: to be infected, but also to reveal that which is latent and hidden - the machinic guts, electricity, and hard materiality beneath the cheery graphic interfaces of the computer. For, in what Marco Deseriis has brilliantly called viral "transubstantiation" (the shift from the immaterial to the material),[26] being exposed to a computer virus reminds us that the digital always requires physical support. But at the same time, it is only in the context of these persistent attempts to obfuscate materiality in fields as diverse as computer science, molecular biology, and traditional media studies, that the computer virus can serve as a tool of exposure - reminding us that to reduce the entire world to the virtual mobility and reproducibility of information is to forget the specificity of media objects, and crucially, to lose sight of those bodies that matter (whether they be machinic, human, or otherwise).
![[24]](http://scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/lipshin/media/copy-footnote-24.jpg){kind=link}
![[25]](http://scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/lipshin/media/copy-footnote-25.jpg){kind=link}
To be exposed to a computer virus, therefore, carries a double meaning: to be infected, but also to reveal that which is latent and hidden - the machinic guts, electricity, and hard materiality beneath the cheery graphic interfaces of the computer. For, in what Marco Deseriis has brilliantly called viral "transubstantiation" (the shift from the immaterial to the material),[26] being exposed to a computer virus reminds us that the digital always requires physical support. But at the same time, it is only in the context of these persistent attempts to obfuscate materiality in fields as diverse as computer science, molecular biology, and traditional media studies, that the computer virus can serve as a tool of exposure - reminding us that to reduce the entire world to the virtual mobility and reproducibility of information is to forget the specificity of media objects, and crucially, to lose sight of those bodies that matter (whether they be machinic, human, or otherwise).
![[26]](http://scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/lipshin/media/copy-footnote-26.jpg){kind=link}
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